I’ve been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I’m so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?
My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:
- 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
- 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
- 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
- 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing…? or nextcloud?)
- potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
- potential email hosting (distant future)
anyways with that all said i have a few questions:
- what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
- any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer


I would absolutely discourage the use of synology and probably any other brand in the NAS realm.
Synology has pulled of some really scummy things in the last few years with their certified SSDs where only a white list of SSDs could be used in an array or when they tried to push their own HDDa and show warnings and messengers to worry the user that something is wrong. Also they retroactively removed transcoding capabilities from their systems.
Those Systems are all quite limited for how expensive they are. They are great for just simple things but with the list OP posted, you would be heavily limited and have to jump through hoops in order to have a well functioning home lab/server.